In this modern age we should be able to offer something like "micro-stocks" to customers. Like a "our product isn't there all the way there, but you use us because you believe in us so we promise that if we are successful we'll pay back the people that believed in us".
Even if the fractions are so small that it only amounts to cents, early supporters now have every incentive to tell ALL their friends about it and root for you however they can
As a customer you also get the piece of mind that later price changes won't be unfair to you. You know that you were somehow compensated for your early commitments. In fact you even stand to benefit from all the new customers price drops could be bringing in
If 500 customers did this, I think the SEC would label this as a "security" and the company would be required to register as a public company, more or less. This is essentially what happened to Facebook which led to them going public: the private equity pool became too diverse and triggered this threshold, so publicly listing made sense.
Why don't Kickstarter campaigns have this problem? AFAIK it's because they are just presales, there's no notion of ownership so they aren't treated as securities. A poorly-designed kickstarter that looked like micro stocks would probably get shot down.
This is usually how Cow Shares work; in practice it's closer to a deposit entitling you to benefits, which is probably the best type of contract for this situation.
Right Ethereum is really lucky to have Bitcoin around to make it look good. It (very recently) cut it's energy usage by ~99.84% yet one ETH transaction is still 50x the amount of energy as a MasterCard transaction
